November 16, 2004

As part of the Oriental Institute's ELECTRONIC PUBLICATIONS ON-LINE, the Chicago Hittite Dictionary Project announces the Electronic CHICAGO HITTITE DICTIONARY (e-CHD), and its first electronic publication, The P volume. Access to the P volume requires downloading to your computer an executable file for either the Windows 2000 & XP platforms or the Macintosh System 10 platform (it will not run on Macintosh computer running System 9.x).

October 28, 2004

Seventy new objects are added to our on-line Iraq Museum Database, bringing the current total to 984 objects. The new additions include Diyala sculpture and Diyala cylinder seals.

October 1, 2004

The Middle East Librarians Association Committee on Iraqi Libraries has received permission to publish two reports, one on the damage done to the Central library of Baghdad University / Al-Waziriyya, the second on the Central Awqaf library in Baghdad. The two reports were written by one of the most energetic archivists working in Iraq today, Mr. Zain Al-Naqshbandi. He is primarily responsible for the investigation and content of the two reports. The report on the Waqf library is certified by Mr. Salah Karim Hussein, the head of the Library, Mr. Asim Dawud Al-Khattab, a specialist in libraries (with five degrees in library and information science) and Mr. Muhibb Al-Din Yasin Ibrahim, one of the employees of the manuscripts section of the Awqaf library who was able to save 109 manuscripts, and find a further five in the post-looting stage. The reports were transmitted to the committee by Hala Fattah, who also prepared the English translations.

May 18, 2004

"Until recently, debates concerning humans and their environment tended to favor either cultural or environmental mechanisms as the driving force behind change, but the most persuasive studies now focus on the interface between human/cultural systems as well as interactions between them. We have proposed that early urban settlements in the Near East provide an ideal laboratory for the study of human-environmental interactions because they offer an enormous array of data drawn from archaeological and textual studies that can be incorporated into an overall social, economic, and environmental analytical framework stretching over several millennia. We are engaged in modeling and attempt to explain trajectories of development and demise of Bronze Age settlement systems for both the rain-fed and irrigated zones of Syria and Iraq. Climate, hydrological, agricultural, demographic, and active agent social models are being combined using Argonne's Dynamic Information Architecture System (DIAS) simulation framework to provide a new holistic dynamic object model. The goal is to determine under what conditions urbanization or its opposite, ruralization or even collapse, might have taken place."

This 136 page bibliography is a work in progress and is available in three formats, .pdf, .doc, .rtf

From the introduction:
"...In order to make this bibliography more "user friendly," I have presented it in the order of topics found in a grammar. The order here is largely traditional (with the customary division of phonology, morphology and syntax), although since the 1960s linguists have paid a great deal of attention to the interface between these levels of grammar. In section 15, the organization for syntax gives precedence of text linguistics before the syntax of clauses and their subunits, reflecting the current view that the sentence does not constitute the largest unit of grammatical analysis. One might go further and present syntax as theoretically prior to, and the context for, situating morphology, and, by extension, phonology as well; however, the traditional order of grammars is retained here for the sense of familiarity that it affords readers. I have included bibliography for the alphabet (under section 2), although properly speaking the alphabet is not a grammatical topic but a matter of the graphic representation of languages. However, the alphabet's historical importance for the study of West Semitic languages dictates its inclusion here. I have included some entries for Hebrew phonology or morphology with little or no mention of Ugaritic, in part to be more inclusive in these areas and in part to promote such work in the study of Ugaritic. Also included are entries for the syntax of particles (under 9.2) and for the verb (under 10.2.1) as well as some select individual verbal roots (under 14.11 and following). The bibliography in section 16 includes both basic and illustrative entries in the areas of lexicography, loanwards and semantics as well as personal names, but listings for dictionaries and lexica for Biblical Hebrew have not been included... Standard abbreviations have been used (see the list in the final section of this introduction); these are found also in Ugarit-Forschungen and Journal of Biblical Literature)."

May 6, 2004

About 300 new objects are added to our on-line Iraq Museum Database, including 250 ivories from Nimrud and 49 seals from Abu Salabikh. A quick overview over the Abu Salabikh Seals can be gained from the "Index of Museum and Excavation Numbers" s.v. "Abu Salabikh". I want to thank Harriet Martin and Nicholas Postgate (British School of Archaeology in Iraq) for generously making photos and descriptions of these seals--both published and unpublished--available to us.

Most of the recently added Nimrud ivories remain to be categorized--they are currently archived in a folder "*uncategorized". Due to the large number of items in it this will take a while to load--a fast connection is recommended. IM and Excavation numbers of these objects are already integrated into the index of IM and Excavation numbers. Once more, I want to thank Georgina Herrmann (British School of Archaeology in Iraq) for making the photographs of these ivories available to us. Over 1,000 ivories still remain to be added to our database over the next few months.

April 28, 2004

April 28, 2004

NBC News coverage of the Oriental Institute's Iraq Museum Database project, "Chicago Researchers Seek Lost Iraqi Treasures" is available on the NBC5.com website:http://www.nbc5.com/news/3243596/detail.html This link will open in a new window!

April 27, 2004

April 15, 2004

We have added three new components to the Site Photos from Iraq web page: Isin, Umm al-Aqarib and Ur, taken by McGuire Gibson. They are added to the photographs of Girsu, Nippur and Uruk posted some days ago.

Gibson's photos of Isin and Umm al-Aqarib show extensive damage to both sites by looting. His dramatic shots of Isin, showing looters caught in action by U.S. marines, highlight the scope of the destruction and the difficult if not impossible task of protecting these sites adequately in the current situation. A harrowing account of the destruction of Isin, based on a site visit by the German archaeologist Susanne Osthoff at about the same time, was published in the New York Times on May 23, 2003:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/23/international/worldspecial/
23LOOT.html?ex=1082088000&en=1ff65d5ad70bd599&ei=5070

These recent photographs are supplemented by links to earlier photographs of five of these sites, taken by John Sanders (Head of the Oriental Institute's Computer Lab and then site architect at Nippur) during the 1970's and 1980's.

April 5, 2004

A new addition to the Oriental Institute's "Lost Treasures From Iraq" database, Site Photos from Iraq, presenting digital photographs of archaeological sites, which were taken by SPC William Peterson during visits in late 2003 / early 2004 and generously forwarded to the Iraq Working Group at the Oriental Institute. They are posted here with permission of of the photographer.

Peterson took photographs of several archaeological sites, of which three (Nippur, Uruk, Girsu) are shown here (a fourth page with pictures of Babylon is in preparation). The pictures from Nippur and Uruk show relatively little obvious disturbance by looters. Stamped bricks found on site (eg., Pictures 65, 66 at Uruk, 29, 30, 31 at Nippur) and damage to brickwork at both the Ziqqurrat of Nippur and Uruk may have been caused by looters while attempting to steal such bricks [Note, however, that looting at the site of Nippur had been reported in July 2003, which may have occurred in areas other than the Ziqqurrat, such as the "Tablet Mound" (Areas TA / TB)], More apparent damage has been caused on both sites by wind and water erosion (note deep water erosion gullies on the site of Uruk). In Girsu, by contrast, photographs of numerous recent robber holes show that this site has clearly been looted in the past year.

We invite people who know something about the sites to comment. We are willing to annotate the captions of photographs if there is something particularly worthy to note.

These changes have affected all category and object pages. Those who bookmarked individual category and object pages are advised to retrieve the new URLs by logging in again through the project's front or category pages.

We continuously are adding new objects and re-classifying objects in an effort to make the data entry as systematic and possible. For that reason, some of the category URL's are likely to change agin over the next few months. Object URL's are unlikely to be affected by these changes.

As of March 15, 2004 the total number of objects from Iraq Museum posted on our website is 534, which include 246 seals and 228 ivories. We hope to increase the number of objects significantly over the next few months.

Note that the names of the category pages were changed to numerical code; bookmarks to the old category pages will no longer work. The URL's of the object pages have remained the same.

The number of objects currently posted on the Oriental Institute's website is now 496, most of them seals from the Diyala and ivories from Nimrud. Work on an additional 1000 object his mostly completed, which we hope to add successively to our website in the next few months.

February 11, 2004

February 5, 2004

Read a recent article from the University of Chicago Chronicle magazine, titled University Archaeologists Return To Amuq, Discover Tomb Unlike Others In Middle East. Aslihan Yener, Associate Professor in the Oriental Institute, is Director of the new excavations at Alalakh, an ancient archaeological site in the Amuq region of southern Turkey. She and other Oriental Institute researchers are involved in an effort to re-establish the institute's work in the region, which began there before World War II.

January 9, 2004

This list will provide occasional reports on developments at ETANA: Electronic Tools and Ancient Near Eastern Archives. and Abzu: Guide to the rapidly increasing, and widely distributed data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East on the Internet.